In most states that still have the death penalty, condemned prisoners are put on a suicide-watch to make sure they don’t kill themselves before the state does. It makes sense, sort of, whether you are for or against capital punishment!

By the same token, a condemned man who gets sick is usually hospitalized until he is well enough to … well, you get the picture.

Congress in its efforts to do what’s best for the nation also, sometimes, goes about it in strange ways. Take The Furloughed Federal Employee Double Dip Elimination Act please!

The FFEDDEA would make it illegal for federal workers to draw unemployment benefits, especially if Congress later reimburses them for the hours they didn’t (couldn’t by law) work.

Back in 2013 (October) many of you will recall that a hissing contest between the White House and the Republican-led House produced a government shutdown. White House staffers and members of Congress continued to get paid. Workers who were locked out of their jobs, at Defense, IRS and many other places, didn’t.

Some of the locked-out feds applied for unemployment, which varies from state to state. A handful qualified for benefits before the shutdown was over. They were then required to pay back the unemployment benefits which, in almost every case, were much less than the salary they were not allowed to earn — for a while — then reimbursed for even though they had not worked. Go figure.

Hence the need for the FFEDDEA. To prevent feds, who are not allowed to work because of a politically-prompted shutdown, but who are later paid anyhow. But not unemployment. Again, go figure!

Some might suggest that Congress and the White House stop creating shutdowns to make (or sometimes lose) a political point.

The same sort of logic applies to the great sequestration monster. It was written at the White House and OK’d by the (then) Democratic Senate majority. It was intended as a poison pill that the Republicans would be too smart to take rather than accept some other compromise. Almost everybody who understood sequestration said it would be terrible, and stupid. That it would cost more than it saved. But they did it anyhow, although both sides have backed off since.

Now the Government Accountability Office is saying the same thing. That is in some of the situations it has reviewed, sequestration cost rather than saved money.

Although some taxpayers have given up, many still hope that political Washington can and will make things better. And that the pols will learn that passing bad laws is worse than passing no laws at all.

A couple of years back, a friend, who was once a pro-fed lobbyist, said the situation today is “sort of like a serial or commercial arsonist who complains that his tax dollars are going to support a fire department. He’s got a point, but not much of one!”

Maybe the government could commission a study as to how skunks settle quarrels over love, food or turf. Politicians might learn something and we, the long-suffering public, might get a break.

NEARLY USELESS FACTOID

By Michael O’Connell

Auburn Prison in New York conducted the first execution by electrocution on Aug. 6, 1890. William Kemmler was condemned to death after being convicted of using an axe to murder his lover, Matilda Ziegler.

Source: History.com

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